Tag-Based Reports; Your Cloud Expenses Demystified

The mere thought of tangled, high-expense cloud bills gives us goosebumps, especially when you don’t have the right arsenal to drill into your expensive cloud. In the era of the cloud where scalability and agility are not worth compromising, have an in-depth understanding of what and where you are spending is a must.

Having said that, the cloud can be the new normal but an expensive one is not. Such a scenario makes digging deep into your cloud usage and analyzing billing trends, the run-of-the-mill essential. We say, know your cloud inside out through a high-resolution lens where each penny you spend is kept track of.

Centilytics brings you the detailed billing report with something called “Cost Allocation By Tags” filter-feature that demystifies cost allocation by every single resource tag (which is a “key_value” pair), for each AWS service associated with it.

Tag-level splitting:

Let us understand how this filter works and guarantees 100% cost allocation reporting with every granular detail you need.

With the sole idea to help you identify those expensive culprits that somehow get masked but keeps on increasing your expenses at an alarming rate, this filter splits your cost at tag-level, against the very services responsible for it.

Simplifying the concept further, Centilytics chops off your tags into their respective keys and values along with the costs incurred against these.

While you are generating or editing a report from our console and should you choose to see where your AWS cloud budget is going tag-by-tag, service-by-service, all you gotta do is select the tag keys and/or tag values you wish to see the detailed cost associated with.

The report generated, then represents each key as a column and the configured values in rows under that column; something like this:

S.no.

AWS Service

Cost($)

Percentage (%)

Environment

1

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

856.77

61.99

Production

2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

334.89

24.23

Untagged

3

Amazon Relational Database Service

81.37

5.89

Untagged

4

Amazon ElastiCache

34.6

2.5

Untagged

5

Amazon Relational Database Service

25.1

1.82

Production

6

Amazon Relational Database Service

25.1

1.82

QA

7

Amazon Simple Storage Service

20.22

1.46

Untagged

8

Cloud Watch

1.38

0.1

Production

9

AWS CloudTrail

1.37

0.1

Untagged

10

Amazon Route 53

1.07

0.08

Untagged

11

Cloud Watch

0.15

0.01

Untagged

12

AWS Config

0.03

0

Untagged

13

Amazon Simple Email Service

0.02

0

Untagged

14

Amazon CloudFront

0

0

Untagged

15

Amazon Simple Notification Service

0

0

Untagged

16

Amazon DynamoDB

0

0

Untagged

17

AWS Key Management Service

0

0

Untagged

The above piece of a billing report shows cost distribution and cost percentage for AWS services used, with a separate column of Environment. Here, “Environment” is the Key of a resource tag a user has selected from the filter and the rows under it are the values, a user wishes to cost against. The resources that are left untagged are displayed with their associated costs, under a default, pre-defined tag value – “Untagged”.

Thus, when we say Tag-based reports for detailed cloud insights, we not just show you the services’ cost that is tagged but drills down your costs, from services to instance families, instance types, and instance IDs as well.

This pretty much defines what this “Cost Allocation By Tags” feature does for you.